In many policy conversations about international higher education, success is described in numbers: how many students go abroad; how many international students are recruited; and how many joint programmes appear in prospectuses. Internationalization is often treated as a metric of performance or branding. What this view misses is how these flows are structured, whose careers they reshape, and how universities are reorganized to make internationalization part of their core work rather than an optional add-on.
This is precisely the space that Mei Li’s From Periphery to Centre occupies. The book argues that over the past four decades, internationalization in China has moved from an experimental and marginal policy to a central strategy shaping how higher education defines its purpose, builds capacity and positions itself globally. Li writes that “the significance of the internationalization strategy in China’s higher education has been shifting from periphery to centre over the past four decades,” and that this strategy has become “its core strategy and key feature.” She develops this argument through four interconnected lines of analysis: academic talent and circulation; internationalization at home; the governance of Sino-foreign joint ventures; and the comparative positioning of Asian higher education cities.
The first strand examines the circulation of academic talent. Li traces how early state concern about “brain drain” evolved into an effort to create “brain circulation.” Rather than assume that researchers trained abroad would either return out of patriotism or never return at all, the state built mechanisms to bring them back under negotiated conditions. The Thousand Youth Talent Program exemplifies this approach, identifying overseas scholars, matching them with Chinese universities, and providing resources to help them “take root” by establishing labs, recruiting doctoral students, and progressing rapidly in promotion. Return is therefore analysed not as patriotic symbolism but as a professional calculation shaped by career opportunities and institutional incentives.
The second strand explores internationalization at home through China’s rise as a destination for international students. Drawing on a survey of 307 students at Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and East China Normal University, Li examines why students came, how they experienced academic life and what they aspired to do afterwards. Many view Chinese academic credentials as a professional advantage, while others plan to work in China or the broader Asian region. However, challenges related to language proficiency, academic rigour requirements, and the availability of support resources have also been identified. Li’s analysis emphasizes that accommodating large numbers of international students necessitates the ongoing development of institutional capacity, including English-language instruction, professional counselling frameworks and administrative structures that were largely absent in the previous generation.
The third strand examines the governance structures of Sino-foreign joint ventures. Such collaborations are frequently depicted as emblematic of status and distinction. Li, however, conceptualizes them as entities characterized by their distinct internal political dynamics. She examines who governs them, who appoints and evaluates staff, how curriculum comparability and quality assurance are negotiated, and how legitimacy is balanced between Chinese regulators and foreign partners. This discussion moves the reader beyond the question of whether a partnership “looks impressive” toward how it functions operationally and politically.
Finally, Li situates these processes in a comparative metropolitan frame by setting Shanghai alongside Hong Kong and Singapore. Instead of contrasting China with the West, she highlights intra-Asian variations in how cities align higher education with urban strategy. Hong Kong and Singapore appear as mature systems where internationalization and city planning are tightly coupled, while Shanghai is portrayed as a rising case where universities have moved faster than city-level coordination. This comparative move refreshes the conversation by shifting attention from national to regional hierarchies of higher education.
The empirical base of From Periphery to Centre is impressively broad. Li combines national and institutional mobility data, interviews with Chinese scholars working in the United States, survey data from international students in Shanghai, and datasets on elite talent-scheme awardees between 2011 and 2018. This range allows her to connect macro-level policy ambition, such as “reintegrate into the world’s higher education system,” to institutional practices, including lab building and programme design, and to the lived experiences of students and academics.
Importantly, Li does not portray internationalization as an unqualified success. She shows how the movement from “a gigantic periphery” toward a more central global position remains contested. International students report uneven support and language barriers; returnees weigh fast-track opportunities against concerns over autonomy; and joint ventures must reconcile the expectations of two regulatory systems. These frictions make the book’s analysis more persuasive, presenting internationalization as ongoing work rather than static achievement.
The book’s main limitation is temporal. Most of its quantitative material ends in 2018, and Li acknowledges that the research was completed before the pandemic, a more optimistic period for Chinese higher education’s global engagement. Since 2020, tightened controls on mobility, knowledge exchange and transnational partnership have redefined many of the dynamics she describes. A brief reflection on these recent shifts would have further enhanced the book’s relevance. Readers might also wish for more ethnographic texture from international students’ daily experiences in Shanghai, particularly around belonging and wellbeing, which the survey identifies but cannot unpack fully.
Despite these boundaries, From Periphery to Centre offers an authoritative, empirically grounded and conceptually nuanced account of how China’s higher education internationalization actually operates: how return is organized rather than celebrated, how hosting students demands new institutional capacities, how joint ventures are governed in practice, and how cities position themselves within regional hierarchies. For scholars and practitioners interested in global knowledge flows, talent policy or the transformation of Sino-foreign partnerships, this is a valuable and thought-provoking contribution.
